I know I left (in terms of posting) but I wanted to come back temporarily to answer this because it's very important to me that something is said. Then I'll leave again.
I imagined the day many times. I thought there would be sweetness at the news, like there was sweetness at her resignation. But they were fresh then, the wounds she inflicted. Not just on the Argentinians, on the Irish, on the Scottish and Welsh, but on the English. She hacked away at us, at our jobs, at the prospects of those of us yet to enter the world of work, terrified at the void she created. It was so much worse for those in the middle of their careers, with skills discarded wholesale. She cut us off at the knees, with the utter conviction that out of the debris, order would be restored from the top downwards, that business would eventually thrive in a country where the poor have fewer rights, and that - eventually - the poor would be offered a chance to work again. If they were lucky. But not yet. Not until they had been thoroughly divested of those rights and brought back to where they deserved to be. Before her loathing of the political systems of other countries was clear (and which she later also proudly destroyed) she practiced her contempt on us, those of us who dared to believe we were born equal. She famously did not believe in society. She did not believe in the weakness of caring. She believed in force. If it was her will, people were forced to accept it. Regardless of anything. She wasn't the Iron Lady. She was Stone.
Within just two minutes of the news becoming public, a friend let me know. I was at work. I told my colleagues. There was no sadness. Within a moment, there was even some levity. In the past two days, parties have broken out across the country. Not wakes, not expressions of remembrance or remorse, but parties. Happy events. A national newspaper had to remove their webpage of condolence because it immediately overflowed with the voices of the previously voiceless, and they had a few words they wanted to say about her. Condolences they were not. Years ago, I had plans. A trip down to London on the day of the funeral, a skinful of ale, and a defiant glare at her coffin going by. Flanked by my mates. People older than me who suffered more. And people younger whose parents have never forgotten and who warned their children lest this be allowed to happen again, this retrograde step into the political topography of a previous century.
The wait for her death has been long and bitter and it has eroded me. I punched the air when she resigned. I thought it was finally over. It wasn't. Politics in Britain remains unbalanced to this day, the needle slammed ever rightward and all three parties clustered at one end of the scale, the void at the other end similar to the devastation she caused in those who fell foul of her, left to rot due only to the city of their birth. It didn't stop when she went. The Thatcher machine rumbled on without her. It rumbled throughout the reign of her political "opposite", the truly Thatcherite Tony Blair. It is the dais from which David Cameron spouts the rhetoric of one who understands little outside his Bullingdon Club oikery, football hooligans allowed to get away with it because it's not football, it's fine dining. Because they are not the working classes, they are the ruling classes.
In my singular defence of Thatcher, she was resolute in what she was doing because she believed in what she was doing. But she created men like Tony Blair, like David Cameron, like Nick Clegg. Three men who rose in power to lead political parties. Three men who, effectively lead and have led political parties at the time they are, and were, in government. And not one of the three believe in even trying to do the right thing. They're the Thatcher Youth all grown up.
She created an environment where someone like Boris Johnson can thrive. Politics should not be the business of the detestable and deplorable faux idiots in it for themselves and damn everyone else who isn't from the old boy's club. Politics is the business of people like Nye Bevan, the son of a coalminer, an entire profession scuttled by Thatcher. Had he been born later, his opportunity to make a difference may too have blown away with the last of the coal dust. His dreaded and ugly socialism, detested by Thatcher, was still rife in the late 1940s and allowed him to battle not just the right but the established experts of the British Medical Association and push through what he called the "pure Socialism" of the National Health Service, a dreadful, dreadful reminder of the ills of left wing thought, yet reknowned throughout the world as a gleaming vision of fairness and equality and what one country should be rightfully proud of. It seems inane today to think of politicians as people who can make appreciable difference. But Bevan did. So did Thatcher. There the similarity ends.
To answer the question, finally, how did I feel? There was some relief that I get to live in a world without her. But it didn't last long. Everything she did and everything she was, the knife that twisted into the guts of this country's majority is now a million splintered shards that pervade everything. It was easy to pull out that blade (which Geoffrey Howe did by transferring it neatly into her back in the closing lines of his resignation speech). But it is now near-impossible to avoid the dragon's teeth that sprang up.
Her death is not a victory. It is not to be cherished. It is not an end to pain or damage. It is another bitter reminder of what she did and what can never be undone. I do not hate her. Hate is an immediate burning frenzy of intensity and passion. What I feel is much deeper and much sadder. If my city was destroyed by a nuclear weapon and never rebuilt. If, in many years, I came back to visit and saw all the places I loved, all those memories still flattened and lost amid the rubble, a reminder of a long-held grief and a past crushed forever by an unfeeling weapon.... if I saw all that then the way I would feel would not be too dissimilar to how I feel now. You don't feel hate for the bomb. Hate is much too small a word, too narrow an emotion, too little of the tale.
Dappled... I know that commenting wise you left the site, but I need to say that what you wrote was beautiful. I could feel those digitally typed words emit so much emotion. There was a rawness like a freshly cut wound but there were much deeper ravines than previously assumed. I felt anguish with under tones of something somber. A somberness that after all this time is finally able to be withdrawn... There were the hints of bitterness. A crunchy bitterness that is akin to stinging lemon juice being mixed in with burnt chicory. Its subtle like a pebble falling into water when no one is present. The action was never seen but the proof that it was there can be seen in the ripples it left behind. Finally, there's a fragile glimmer of Hope.
***
I don't know how to quite put this into words but I'll try. I feel like there were so many things left unsaid that needed to be said. Things that I formulated answers to in my head but in the end I never really got to explain them. I can't help but to feel like the music was left off on sour notes... (When the time comes, I'll try to send an email that is less vague and more detailed.) I know that you had a concrete reason to leave the site with only a few remnants of your self left and I am in no way trying to drag you back but, how do I say this...?
Wow, I got such a shock when I saw your name on the email notification! I'd assumed that you'd left ages ago, in terms of both posting and reading. It feels really strange that you haven't and that you're just being silent with everyone. Although I don't *really* understand it, so I would be confused.
Either way, I'm glad you came back to write this, even if it was only temporarily. You've been missed, purple villain! So, um, hi. And toodles...again!:P Argh, I'm so crap at saying good bye to people, I should just hire Avant to do all my writing for me!:)
Ha! I just knew this was your story, fruitface. It's funny how you get to know each others anonymity here. I nearly always spotted you. Your personality comes across so strongly here. :P
I've kind of left but someone made me a gift of Gold and I really appreciated it and wanted to use it rather than just discard someone's present. So I use it to look at the unmoderated stories (always fun to predict what will get through and what won't). My own subscription runs out next month and then my month's worth of gifted Gold starts so I have it until June 21st.
I kind of like that it ends on the year's longest day, the halfway point through the year, where everything is at its peak, and things start drawing in again for the winter.
Anyway, hope all is good in the closet and that you aren't being bothered by too many nuts. :P
:O Ahh, you shocked me via email notification again! I didn't expect you to reply, I thought you were being cold with everyone.:P And yeah, I'm an obvious OP, although I didn't think this post would be obvious since I didn't even write a description! Pfft, I guess I must just come across as being the sort of person who asks questions about old women dying.:P
And why would you want to leave at the peak?! Aww, you're going to miss the 2nd IIN Purple Day as well! Eek, that doesn't feel nearly as long ago as it actually was.:/ Ah well.
Haha! Yeah, all is peachy in the closet, no nuts here!:P
What was your reaction to Margaret Thatcher's death?
← View full post
I know I left (in terms of posting) but I wanted to come back temporarily to answer this because it's very important to me that something is said. Then I'll leave again.
I imagined the day many times. I thought there would be sweetness at the news, like there was sweetness at her resignation. But they were fresh then, the wounds she inflicted. Not just on the Argentinians, on the Irish, on the Scottish and Welsh, but on the English. She hacked away at us, at our jobs, at the prospects of those of us yet to enter the world of work, terrified at the void she created. It was so much worse for those in the middle of their careers, with skills discarded wholesale. She cut us off at the knees, with the utter conviction that out of the debris, order would be restored from the top downwards, that business would eventually thrive in a country where the poor have fewer rights, and that - eventually - the poor would be offered a chance to work again. If they were lucky. But not yet. Not until they had been thoroughly divested of those rights and brought back to where they deserved to be. Before her loathing of the political systems of other countries was clear (and which she later also proudly destroyed) she practiced her contempt on us, those of us who dared to believe we were born equal. She famously did not believe in society. She did not believe in the weakness of caring. She believed in force. If it was her will, people were forced to accept it. Regardless of anything. She wasn't the Iron Lady. She was Stone.
Within just two minutes of the news becoming public, a friend let me know. I was at work. I told my colleagues. There was no sadness. Within a moment, there was even some levity. In the past two days, parties have broken out across the country. Not wakes, not expressions of remembrance or remorse, but parties. Happy events. A national newspaper had to remove their webpage of condolence because it immediately overflowed with the voices of the previously voiceless, and they had a few words they wanted to say about her. Condolences they were not. Years ago, I had plans. A trip down to London on the day of the funeral, a skinful of ale, and a defiant glare at her coffin going by. Flanked by my mates. People older than me who suffered more. And people younger whose parents have never forgotten and who warned their children lest this be allowed to happen again, this retrograde step into the political topography of a previous century.
The wait for her death has been long and bitter and it has eroded me. I punched the air when she resigned. I thought it was finally over. It wasn't. Politics in Britain remains unbalanced to this day, the needle slammed ever rightward and all three parties clustered at one end of the scale, the void at the other end similar to the devastation she caused in those who fell foul of her, left to rot due only to the city of their birth. It didn't stop when she went. The Thatcher machine rumbled on without her. It rumbled throughout the reign of her political "opposite", the truly Thatcherite Tony Blair. It is the dais from which David Cameron spouts the rhetoric of one who understands little outside his Bullingdon Club oikery, football hooligans allowed to get away with it because it's not football, it's fine dining. Because they are not the working classes, they are the ruling classes.
--
dappled
10 years ago
|
pl
Comment Hidden (
show
)
Report
7
7
In my singular defence of Thatcher, she was resolute in what she was doing because she believed in what she was doing. But she created men like Tony Blair, like David Cameron, like Nick Clegg. Three men who rose in power to lead political parties. Three men who, effectively lead and have led political parties at the time they are, and were, in government. And not one of the three believe in even trying to do the right thing. They're the Thatcher Youth all grown up.
She created an environment where someone like Boris Johnson can thrive. Politics should not be the business of the detestable and deplorable faux idiots in it for themselves and damn everyone else who isn't from the old boy's club. Politics is the business of people like Nye Bevan, the son of a coalminer, an entire profession scuttled by Thatcher. Had he been born later, his opportunity to make a difference may too have blown away with the last of the coal dust. His dreaded and ugly socialism, detested by Thatcher, was still rife in the late 1940s and allowed him to battle not just the right but the established experts of the British Medical Association and push through what he called the "pure Socialism" of the National Health Service, a dreadful, dreadful reminder of the ills of left wing thought, yet reknowned throughout the world as a gleaming vision of fairness and equality and what one country should be rightfully proud of. It seems inane today to think of politicians as people who can make appreciable difference. But Bevan did. So did Thatcher. There the similarity ends.
To answer the question, finally, how did I feel? There was some relief that I get to live in a world without her. But it didn't last long. Everything she did and everything she was, the knife that twisted into the guts of this country's majority is now a million splintered shards that pervade everything. It was easy to pull out that blade (which Geoffrey Howe did by transferring it neatly into her back in the closing lines of his resignation speech). But it is now near-impossible to avoid the dragon's teeth that sprang up.
Her death is not a victory. It is not to be cherished. It is not an end to pain or damage. It is another bitter reminder of what she did and what can never be undone. I do not hate her. Hate is an immediate burning frenzy of intensity and passion. What I feel is much deeper and much sadder. If my city was destroyed by a nuclear weapon and never rebuilt. If, in many years, I came back to visit and saw all the places I loved, all those memories still flattened and lost amid the rubble, a reminder of a long-held grief and a past crushed forever by an unfeeling weapon.... if I saw all that then the way I would feel would not be too dissimilar to how I feel now. You don't feel hate for the bomb. Hate is much too small a word, too narrow an emotion, too little of the tale.
--
Avant-Garde
10 years ago
|
pl
Comment Hidden (
show
)
Report
5
5
-
Anonymous Post Author
10 years ago
|
pl
Comment Hidden (
show
)
Report
4
4
-
LaMer
10 years ago
|
pl
Comment Hidden (
show
)
Report
3
3
-
searchingnow
10 years ago
|
pl
Comment Hidden (
show
)
Report
0
0
Dappled... I know that commenting wise you left the site, but I need to say that what you wrote was beautiful. I could feel those digitally typed words emit so much emotion. There was a rawness like a freshly cut wound but there were much deeper ravines than previously assumed. I felt anguish with under tones of something somber. A somberness that after all this time is finally able to be withdrawn... There were the hints of bitterness. A crunchy bitterness that is akin to stinging lemon juice being mixed in with burnt chicory. Its subtle like a pebble falling into water when no one is present. The action was never seen but the proof that it was there can be seen in the ripples it left behind. Finally, there's a fragile glimmer of Hope.
***
I don't know how to quite put this into words but I'll try. I feel like there were so many things left unsaid that needed to be said. Things that I formulated answers to in my head but in the end I never really got to explain them. I can't help but to feel like the music was left off on sour notes... (When the time comes, I'll try to send an email that is less vague and more detailed.) I know that you had a concrete reason to leave the site with only a few remnants of your self left and I am in no way trying to drag you back but, how do I say this...?
I miss you and I am sorry.
-Avant
Wow, I got such a shock when I saw your name on the email notification! I'd assumed that you'd left ages ago, in terms of both posting and reading. It feels really strange that you haven't and that you're just being silent with everyone. Although I don't *really* understand it, so I would be confused.
Either way, I'm glad you came back to write this, even if it was only temporarily. You've been missed, purple villain! So, um, hi. And toodles...again!:P Argh, I'm so crap at saying good bye to people, I should just hire Avant to do all my writing for me!:)
--
dappled
10 years ago
|
pl
Comment Hidden (
show
)
Report
4
4
Ha! I just knew this was your story, fruitface. It's funny how you get to know each others anonymity here. I nearly always spotted you. Your personality comes across so strongly here. :P
I've kind of left but someone made me a gift of Gold and I really appreciated it and wanted to use it rather than just discard someone's present. So I use it to look at the unmoderated stories (always fun to predict what will get through and what won't). My own subscription runs out next month and then my month's worth of gifted Gold starts so I have it until June 21st.
I kind of like that it ends on the year's longest day, the halfway point through the year, where everything is at its peak, and things start drawing in again for the winter.
Anyway, hope all is good in the closet and that you aren't being bothered by too many nuts. :P
--
Anonymous Post Author
10 years ago
|
pl
Comment Hidden (
show
)
Report
1
1
:O Ahh, you shocked me via email notification again! I didn't expect you to reply, I thought you were being cold with everyone.:P And yeah, I'm an obvious OP, although I didn't think this post would be obvious since I didn't even write a description! Pfft, I guess I must just come across as being the sort of person who asks questions about old women dying.:P
And why would you want to leave at the peak?! Aww, you're going to miss the 2nd IIN Purple Day as well! Eek, that doesn't feel nearly as long ago as it actually was.:/ Ah well.
Haha! Yeah, all is peachy in the closet, no nuts here!:P
Still lurking?
That's beautiful.
--
dappled
10 years ago
|
pl
Comment Hidden (
show
)
Report
2
2
Thank you, although I'd never have thought something beautiful could come from her dreadful existence. :)
--
braintrip
10 years ago
|
pl
Comment Hidden (
show
)
Report
0
0
YOUR BACK!!!:D
its randompopcorn, btw, just felt like saying hello=)